The Unsung Heroes of Scientific Software (nature.com)

An anonymous reader sends this news from Nature: For researchers who code, academic norms for tracking the value of their work seem grossly unfair. They can spend hours contributing to software that underpins research, but if that work does not result in the authorship of a research paper and accompanying citations, there is little way to measure its impact. ... Enter Depsy, a free website launched in November 2015 that aims to "measure the value of software that powers science."

[Postdoc researcher Klaus] Schliep's profile on that site shows that he has contributed in part to seven software packages, and that he shares 34% of the credit for phangorn. Those packages have together received more than 2,600 downloads, have been cited in 89 open-access research papers and have been heavily recycled for use in other software — putting Schliep in the 99th percentile of all coders on the site by impact.

Comments

Yes, that is a very real problem

[muecksteiner]

And yes, we have to fix this somehow, sooner or later. At least in my area (Computer Graphics), complex, cutting-edge research increasingly builds on highly specialised software stacks that are being maintained by researchers the community. Whose efforts usually are not appropriately rewarded. An example is meshlab: that thing is hugely useful for lots of people - but in retrospect, the main author has all but described developing it as a mistake. As it cost him too much time that he would have needed elsewhere in his career efforts.

A few guys are lucky, like Wenzel Jakob: he both wrote Mitsuba (the extremely useful research path tracer that everyone uses these days to build on), as well as a couple of high profile publications that set him up for an academic career. But in a lot of cases, even very good researchers only have the time and brainpower for one thing at a time: software *or* publications. We need both of them, but only reward one category. Bad move, systemically speaking.

Re:Yes, that is a very real problem

[Anonymous Coward]

We need both of them, but only reward one category. Bad move, systemically speaking

Isn't this a broader problem in academia? Where I work there is huge pressure for teaching commitments, and zero recognition for it. The same goes for admin: one of the senior "makes the departmental world go round" jobs was unfilled for months because nobody wanted it, everyone knew it was a huge time-sink which took away from research and grant proposals but also came with zero recognition. Eventually the Head of School had to pretty much just drop it on someone.

I know this probably varies a lot from place to place, but if Universities want academics to teach, do research, bring in grants, help run the department, do public outreach as well as more specific things like software then all of that needs to be recognised, otherwise some people will just narrowly focus on research/grants and the people who do try to be more "fleshed out" do so at the expense of their own career.

Re:Yes, that is a very real problem

[Anonymous Coward]

If your researches are spending so much time writing papers, then clearly your research teams needs an editor. Or better yet, a technical writer.

Re:Yes, that is a very real problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Blask's Axiom - what you measure will be gamed

hobbyist whiner spiritual (r)evolution continues

[Anonymous Coward]

... catch our breath,, conspire to participate in the truth...

Publish a description

[Anonymous Coward]

...of the software and then request citations as parts of the license agreement. It's not a guarantee, and yes some will fail to cite properly, but at a present a short (possibly even conference) paper with a citation request really is you're best bet to get some credit.

The difficult part is finding a journal that will accept a description-of-software type paper *and* has a decent ranking. I'm somewhat lucky to have such a journal in my field, but I know that other fields are not so fortunate.

Re:Publish a description

[Anonymous Coward]

There are some really scary license agreements in the scientific software field. I used to work at an HPC site and we had all kinds of scientific software installed on our clusters. Some of them are non-free (as in proprietary) but either allowed us to have a site license or at least install the binaries and let users bring their own license file. One of the worst packages I had to deal with was VASP. We even had to lock down the install directory with permissions so that you couldn't even list the files there unless we had received written confirmation from the University of Vienna that our user was a member of a research group that had a legal license to the software.

Re:Publish a description

[Anonymous Coward]

And yes, I think VASP has a clause that you had to cite them. For non-free software they can do that but for free software (GPL etc.) it's not that easy to request and still be free software. The problem is that if you're doing the kind of research that VASP is for then you basically have no choice, it's the only thing available and that's the case in many narrow scientific fields. This not Matlab or GNU Octave kind of software, this is really specific tools for doing very specific type of research.

Re: Publish a description

[friedmud]

You don't have to mess with your license at all. Scientists are good at citing things if you give them something to cite.

We try to publish a few papers yearly about new aspects of our software... and the scientists that use those pieces of the software naturally cite this papers without issue. We post our citations on our website and many people also email the mailing list to ask for the appropriate thing to cite when they're publishing findings based on our software.

What about Scientific Linux?

[CRC'99]

Scientific Linux is a distribution along the lines of CentOS that is sponsored by Fermilab.

From their about page:

Scientific Linux is a Fermilab sponsored project. Our primary user base is within the High Energy and High Intensity Physics community. However, our users come from a wide variety of industries with various use cases all over the globe – and sometimes off of it!

Our Mission: Driven by Fermilab’s scientific mission and focusing on the changing needs of experimental facilities, Scientific Linux should provide a world class environment for scientific computing needs.

See: http://scientificlinux.org/

Re:What about Scientific Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's crap. It combines the worst of CentOS / Red Hat Linux with the pitfalls of academically managed IT.

Fedora is much better, where bugs do, gasp, get fixed in a timely manner. If you can manage the shortish release cycle.

Re:What about Scientific Linux?

[mwvdlee]

Depsy currently only scans Python and R projects.
It's probably going to take a bit more processing power to include all popular programming languages.

Re:What about Scientific Linux?

[CRC'99]

It's crap. It combines the worst of CentOS / Red Hat Linux with the pitfalls of academically managed IT.

Fedora is much better, where bugs do, gasp, get fixed in a timely manner. If you can manage the shortish release cycle.

You know, I see this a lot opinion from youngsters who have never administered mission critical systems. For your basic web server & SQL database, Fedora is fine - but how many copies of Fedora would ever get installed on the ISS?

Re:What about Scientific Linux?

[ssam]

High energy physics often involves setting up systems for data acquisition, experiment control, data management, etc, that need to run for 10 or 15 years with minimal maintenance or change. That requires pretty long support cycles.

Re:What about Scientific Linux?

[lorinc]

SL was so much outdated that we ditched it out of our cluster 2 years ago and replaced it with ubuntu server. Having to manually install a compiler that handles C++11 in 2014 is pretty bad. Hell, we even ditched it out of the whole CS department. I grant you it's robust (even if we had some dirty problems), but it's too outdated to be usefull.

Re:What about Scientific Linux?

[jma05]

Well, he is not on ISS. Why does he need to care?

The work is exploratory, not mission critical. The needs of academia are almost the opposite of ISS or even an average business/web setup. An occasional crash is not a big deal in academia. Getting a new algorithm that someone recently published to work is. Many systems in academia are sloppily managed and that's fine. People aren't doing IT here. These are researchers doing science, not sys admins. IT is an after-thought. Its just-enough IT. People look to Ubuntu or Fedora because help is easy to find in a forum and packages are plenty. Of course, academia is not monolithic and there are various technical cultures within it.

Re:What about Scientific Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

For everything else, you can just use CentOS or Debian. They have much better infrastructure and community support. There's nothing in so special in Scientific Linux that you can't install on CentOS or RH.

Scientific Linux adds hardly anything of value to CentOS at the cost of less effective IT management.

Re: What about Scientific Linux?

[zaphirplane]

How crap is it compared to cent is. I thought it was a recompiled red hat from source
Maybe slower releasing updates

Re:What about Scientific Linux?

[Baloroth]

The mention of the ISS was not accidental: Scientific Linux has, in fact, been installed there. As a matter of fact, in experimental physics the OS often is mission critical. You need something to run the detectors, after all. While at a low level that usually means firmware or ASICs, at the level of the experimenter that typically means using a computer, with a rather conventional OS installed. Stability there is vital, as a crash could mean (worst case) damage to the equipment, or best case some usually rather expensive downtime for the experiment.

Re:What about Scientific Linux?

[Hognoxious]

They also produce a version for CPUs without PAE, because CERN have loads of old boards controlling $deityKnowsWhat.

Very few mainline distros will work on machines like my old T-40. I think there's an LTS mint that does too.

Re:What about Scientific Linux?

[StuffMaster]

Unfair question! I'm sure hats aren't allowed on the ISS.

No it isn't

[Viol8]

Unless its freeware the guy gets paid for writing the stuff so he can't complain and if it is freeware then that was his choice to do it. He can't co-opt someone elses plaudits just because he created a tool they used.

If you really believe that then perhaps you think the company that built the power sockets or the desk or made the PC motherboard should also get a mention? Where does it end? We all use things invented and built by others to do our jobs.

Re:No it isn't

[muecksteiner]

You have a good point with regard to "where does it end". But you seem to have mis-understood what this is about: this is not about automatically getting credits or co-authorship whenever someone uses the software you wrote. That would indeed be strange.

Rather, the point they are making is that being the (co-)author of such a software should count as much as being the (co-)author a paper, with regard to getting tenure, or for general performance reviews within academia. Sort-of-similar metrics could be applied to this as they are applied to publications: how many people downloaded it (probably a fairly bad metric), how many papers mention using the software for experiments (probably better). The whole thing is a bit shaky, of course: if someone writes some fairly trivial piece of software that ends up being ubiquitous, they get lots of credit - while highly specialised software that took ages and lots of brainpower to develop scores low.

But this dilemma is of course equally true for publications themselves: citation counts and such are not very good metrics, either.

Re:No it isn't

[Viol8]

"Rather, the point they are making is that being the (co-)author of such a software should count as much as being the (co-)author a paper, with regard to getting tenure, or for general performance reviews within academia."

Why? The software is a tool. The software authors had nothing to do with the original research undertaken by the scientists. You might as well make the programmers of MS Word that the paper was written on co-authors too. Its absurd.

Re:No it isn't

[Ambassador Kosh]

A lot of scientific software is extremely specific and designed to enable very specific types of research. There are many fields where there are 1 or 2 pieces of software exist and they where written inside the community.

They most certainly should get credit for writing that software and enabling very specific research since in many cases without the software the research would not even exist.

Re:No it isn't

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, he chose to do it, but it's a choice that for many people means the end of their academic career. There's a huge amount of great scientific software coming out of the universities, but it tends to count very little toward a new faculty's tenure review. If you don't get tenure; you're fired. The unique issue for software is that it takes a very long time to write well and drains resources for its maintenance. For tenure, you're typically evaluated on your ability to get grants, research papers, departmental service (conferences and research groups), and teaching in about that order, though, it varies. Notice that software isn't in there. Yes, you can get a publication out of a piece of scientific software, but you're really looking at a single paper, or 2-3 if you really milk it. Tenure track faculty need to be publishing 5-10 papers per year over the traditional 7 year probationary period.

Now, is this a cultural problem at universities? Absolutely. But those of us in this situation have every reason to gripe. It's not that we're not getting paid. It's that we're running the very real possibility that we're going to get fired after providing an extremely valuable service to the greater community.

Re:No it isn't

[muecksteiner]

Exactly this. Including the authors of Word would indeed be absurd. But the authors of software that is *directly pertinent* to the research in questions should get some sort of credit.

Of course, this has fuzzy borders: to stay with the graphics examples, meshlab is probably too general to get much credit these days (it is a MS Word of mesh processing, so to speak). Mitsuba, on the other hand, probably counts for a lot of research papers where it was used - for a number of tasks, no comparable open-source software exists.

Re:No it isn't

[Viol8]

"They most certainly should get credit for writing that software and enabling very specific research since in many cases without the software the research would not even exist."

Without many other things the research wouldn't exist either. Unless the software or its authors came up with the idea of the original research or had some hand in how it was conducted then they have no business being on the paper and just because some piece of software is a one off doesn't change this in the slightest.

Perhaps the guy who built The Globe should take some credit for Shakespears plays? No? Why not? Without him building somewhere for the plays to be performed its doubtful shakespear would have even written half of them.

Re:No it isn't

[Archtech]

Unless its freeware the guy gets paid for writing the stuff so he can't complain and if it is freeware then that was his choice to do it. He can't co-opt someone elses plaudits just because he created a tool they used.

I think you have missed the point. It isn't a matter of "co-opting someone else's plaudits", more of getting an appropriate share of them. Perhaps that share should be a small one; or perhaps it should be dominant. The fact that it's freeware isn't really relevant. Do you think that the inventors of the alphabet, the number system, the periodic table of the elements, or the Web should be denied credit for their work just because they didn't "monetize" it? Believe it or not, there are still other values than money.

If you really believe that then perhaps you think the company that built the power sockets or the desk or made the PC motherboard should also get a mention? Where does it end? We all use things invented and built by others to do our jobs.

Again, this is quite true but not apropos. The companies you mention are in the business of manufacturing and installing certain types of equipment - hardware - as products for sale at a given price. With respect to almost any imaginable scientific project, their contributions would be strictly commodities - fungible with similar products on sale from many rival vendors. Moreover, there is nothing special about electricity or PC hardware that would be distinctively useful to a specific scientific project.

The case is entirely different with purpose-built software. Without it, the research would be difficult or impossible. And it is presumably difficult or impossible to obtain such software from any other source, whether paid-for or free.

Re:No it isn't

[Ambassador Kosh]

This is a horrible comparison. Shakespeare could have done his plays in any theater.

I am talking about custom written software that solves an EXTREMELY narrow niche and without it a lot of the research in the field would not even happen.

I

Re:No it isn't

[sensei moreh]

If someone is publishing 5-10 papers a year for 7 years, they don't have time to do any research, let alone write anything more complicated than Hello World in their favorite language.

Re:No it isn't

[gfxguy]

But writing software isn't research or necessarily insightful at all - if one person comes up with a theory or model or formula, and another person codes it, the person who coded it didn't contribute anything to the actual research, and any decent programmer would be able to implement someone else's algorithms. If the programmer came up with a way to test or do something in particular, then they certainly should get credit, but merely implementing someone else's research is NOT research in, and of, itself.

And yes, I really come to this perspective as a former research assistant who had to code my professor's theories, because anyone at my level could have done it.

Re:No it isn't

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever used any scientific software? No we're not talking about using MS Word or GNU Emacs for writing papers, we're talking about the down to the bits tools that scientists use on HPC clusters.

Re:No it isn't

[gfxguy]

But who did the research? As I mentioned in another reply, when I was a research assistant, if some professor came up with some algorithm or criteria for a simulation and asked me to implement it, why should I get any research credit? I did get mentioned a couple of times in credits for having implemented the software, but anyone at my level could have done it... I got zero research credit in those cases, and didn't deserve any.

Re:No it isn't

[Ambassador Kosh]

Well the software I am talking about is the result of a lot of very difficult research that has taken many years to do. The people writing the software are doing the research.

There is no simple algorithm that a professor came up. It is a complex physical model and it is highly non-trivial to figure out which parts need to be modeled and why to get the correct physical behavior.

Others use the software to try and solve a specific problem that would have been impossible without a lot of very hard work in getting the technology to do it. That work should be given credit since in the academic community credit is all that really matters for your career long term. That is one reason I don't like academia and look forward to finishing and going back into corporate research.

Re:No it isn't

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize that there are more types of scientific software than the type that your professor asked you to write while you were a research assistant? There are lots of scientific software that consists of hundreds of thousands of lines of fortran code written by established research groups for well over 30 years. This is not just some lightweight tools that someone hacked together while in-between classes.

Re:No it isn't

[gfxguy]

In that case I agree, but perhaps the software like that is then worthy of it's own research paper.

Re:No it isn't

[Viol8]

"This is a horrible comparison. Shakespeare could have done his plays in any theater."

And the people doing the research could have probably done it in Matlab given enough time. Your point is?

Re:No it isn't

[gfxguy]

It doesn't matter what the effort was, it matters who did the research. Writing code isn't research. If the people writing the code came up with something new and innovative in order to solve a problem on their own, then that in itself should be the topic of their own research paper.

Re: No it isn't

[zaphirplane]

Right also word isn't free and it's as silly to credit MS as to credit Toyota for making the car that you drove to work . Crediting the guy that gave you a lift everyday and saved you an hour commute is reasonable and a better analogy

Re:No it isn't

[Ambassador Kosh]

It has had lots of research papers. However, when people use it the software/papers should also be cited.

Re:No it isn't

[tibit]

If one person comes up with a theory or model or formula that is not implemented at the moment, it's not even generally possible to tell if their contribution is of any use. To get results, you need an implementation, and the implementation is absolutely crucial. Even in terms of algorithmic improvements in "pure" computer science, if the real life implementations are constrained such that the algorithmic improvement doesn't matter, the value of the theoretical improvement is decreased or it simply becomes irrelevant and nobody will cite it.

Re:No it isn't

[tibit]

The code is integral to the research. Your prof's theories are useless without the code that shows that they are of some use and that they work. Just as you are "replaceable", your professor is, too. So don't think any less of yourself just for being replaceable: most of us are. Furthermore, personally, I believe the implementer is due same credit as the researcher. One can't exist without the other, it's a very close symbiosis.

Re:No it isn't

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a federally funded computer science researcher who has been coauthor on many papers in a range of CS, systems, e-science, and bioinformatics venues over the last two decades. My personal contributions to certain popular open-source, academic software was instrumental in its existence and availability.

When niche software is newly written for a science project, I agree its authors could/should be coauthors on the science it enables. If they are not, that is probably an internal failure of the lab management, much like not giving credit to other significant contributors who did much of the science work as post docs or lab staff who were neither P.I. nor the principal grad students on the grant. Sometimes, the software authors should publish companion computer science or applied engineering papers to get their own research credit, and these papers can have cross-citation with the other science papers for the same research project.

But, once the software is reused in other projects, the original software developers deserve authorship credit no more than the vendors and suppliers of all the other specialized lab materials used in research. This does not mean they produced the new science research, but that their products are useful to science. We don't see the vendors of chemicals, DNA sequencers, microscopes, mice, and safety equipment given authorship in biology papers every time those products are used. Those vendors may point to such research in their own marketing materials, and so may software developers. In the research space, this means your future grant applications can point to these other uses of your software, even if you were not coauthor on those papers... that's your equivalent of marketing.

The argument earlier in this thread, that researchers can either write software or write papers (but not both), makes about as much sense as saying that biologists can either perform lab research or write papers. Everyone can do more if they could avoid all the limits of time or other finite resources, or if they had a stable full of ponies. Funds hunting, continued study, experimentation, networking, and publication all take time and are all part of the job of a contemporary scientific team.

Re:No it isn't

[gfxguy]

The code is integral to the research. Your prof's theories are useless without the code that shows that they are of some use and that they work. Just as you are "replaceable", your professor is, too. So don't think any less of yourself just for being replaceable: most of us are.

I didn't exactly mean it that way. I'm not trying to understate the importance of implementing something complex.

Furthermore, personally, I believe the implementer is due same credit as the researcher.

I just disagree with that... if the researcher comes up with a theory, and the programmer comes up with a way to test it, then sure - but if the researcher comes up with a theory and the programmer implements a way to test it that the researcher gave the programmer ("this is how you test it, here's the algorithm"), or it was some known way to test the theory, then the programmer hasn't actually done any research. I'm not saying the code isn't important, I'm saying it's not "research." They can get thanks, they can get a mention, just as if off the shelf (already existing code) is used then that program can be mentioned... but if the code is actually something new and innovative that the programmer came up with to test or verify something, then it is it's own topic for research and they can get their own credit.

Re:No it isn't

[nycsubway]

If someone is publishing 5-10 papers a year, this means someone else is doing the actual work and that person is only authoring the papers. That brings up the topic of authorship. Whose names should go onto a paper, and in what order? The first author is sometimes a person who puts together the manuscript template, gets comments from everyone else, and searches EndNote's pubmed connection for manuscript titles that match the context without actually reading the cited article. (You know what I'm talking about!) What about the person who did the actual analysis, the person who came up with the idea for the analysis, the person who collected the data? Where does the head of the lab's name go? usually at the end, just because his grant paid for the staff, even though he barely looked at the manuscript before submission? What about the rest of the research staff who made it possible for the first author to have anything to write about?

I'm the software engineer in my dept. I write the tools that everyone uses to do the analysis for their papers. The software is so ubiquitous in our department that no one mentions it in their papers unless I specifically ask them to cite my original article. Authorship is always a big thing and hard to sort out. You sometimes have to be forceful to get recognition.

In my lab, we have one guy who writes the majority of the papers. He sits as a right-hand man to the lab director, and is first author on nearly all papers. Is he the smartest one in the lab? Absolutely not. Did he do the work for the papers? Not really; the research assistants collected and cleaned the data, the software person wrote the analysis tools, and the analysts do most of the analysis. And all of them wrote large sections of the paper. Did he come up with the analysis ideas? Nope. His job is basically to summarize everyone else's work and then be the corresponding author. Does he redo the analysis when a revision comes back? Nope. So, this one lucky individual gets authorship on tons of publications because he knows how to work the lab director. Even in academia, it's politics that determines authorship and recognition.

Re:No it isn't

[Anonymous Cow Ward]

I agree that the people writing the software shouldn't necessarily be on the paper. However, I think they should still get credit for working on it. If you're in a community of scientists, all working on related projects that require complicated software, doesn't it make the most sense to have a few people develop it and distribute it to everyone else, rather than each lab having to make their own? Having one standardized version (or package, since not everyone will be on the same version) makes it easier to troubleshoot and reproduce results.

And, if it's easier or better to have a few people make it - or most people do a little bit rather than the whole thing - you need an incentive to get them to do it. Credit, in some form, seems like the best way to go about that.

Re:No it isn't

[BVis]

I don't think we're really talking about who gets credit on a published paper. We're talking about someone in the employ of a research institution or higher learning who works on software that enables others' research and allows them to publish research that they otherwise would not be able to. We're talking about someone receiving credit for the work that they've done with regards to their own professional accomplishments. Traditionally the only work that's been of any significance to their performance reviews or evaluation for a tenured position is publishing research papers; the point of this discussion is to ask why their work on software that enables research "doesn't count" because their names are not on a published paper. Essentially, that work has no value in that discussion, and that isn't right. Creating this software should also count as an accomplishment by those individuals for the purposes of measuring their performance. The fact that it doesn't at the moment is most likely due to bias on the part of those doing the evaluations; any time someone can give someone a review or evaluation that doesn't rate a raise or promotion/tenure, they do so, right or wrong.

Re:No it isn't

[Darinbob]

These program are often being written by academics which can cut into time doing research. But these programs are vital for the research. If this were physics and the academic spent a significant portion of the year helping to build and manage a new particle collider, do they get credit for it or get accused of wasting time instead of writing papers?

This is not a binary freeware versus commercial software debate.

Re:No it isn't

[Darinbob]

In the past I remember some software would get a small academic paper, enough for a conference. Then it would get cited many times by others who used it. But software is getting more complex now and may need more than a team of 2 or 3 grad students to develop and maintain it.

Re: No it isn't

[delt0r]

Well have you ever wondered why medical journals have impact factors around 50? It is because medical people really do expect just about every piece of bullshit to get them on the author list.

No need for heroes

[lorinc]

Please stop the bullshit of heroes with superpower in science, as science never was about glorifying people and personality cults. Leave that to the entertainment industry.

The whole science star system is doing much more harm than good to the actual scientific outcomes.

People tend to optimize the metric that is used. If that metric is popularity, they'll do as much as they can to become popular, with no correlation whatsoever to the importance of their original field. Publishing crappy results on a new dataset so that everyone can beat you gets you more citations than providing insights to why some methods work and some don't. Publishing a shitty software that allows a million master student to make up wrong results for the master's thesis get you more download than writing a correct implementation of uncommon algorithms.

I went into science because I didn't give a shit about the smoke and mirrors that are so important in other fields. Most of my best technical students now are just disgusted by the "appearance prevails" mentality that is at the core of other disciplines. Please leave science as it ought to be: efficient but careless about the image.

Re:No need for heroes

[Anonymous Coward]

I totally agree--the cult of popularity has really poisoned science. I suspect it's always been that way to some extent, but with seemingly exponential growth in communication it seems to have become worse, and it really needs to stop. This is one area where just because something has been a certain way for some time doesn't mean it needs to continue that way.

I think, though, that the phenomenon in question is still a problem, and in many ways illustrates the problem of beatification in science well. In this particular case, it highlights the particular problem that individuals who do things like coding and math, which arguably underlies everything else that gets done, rarely get credit.

I agree that trying to create another popularity metric is not the solution, but drawing attention to the problem is important.

I don't see an issue.

[Anonymous Coward]

No other field has problems with people crying for the ego stroking of needing to have their worth validated by "impact". Another crybaby sheltered academic. Join the real world and see what life is really like. Most code ending up in the dumpster of botched projects (sometimes by the coding team, but often by poor management).

The importance of software is overstated

[Anonymous Coward]

The most important papers in science are frequently cited because of their data, not their methodology. It's expensive to take measurements compared to writing your own code.

Re:conference

[Anonymous Coward]

Go away, spammer. This is Slashdot, not Foreheaddot.

How do you get listed?

[friedmud]

How do you get listed? My software project isn't listed. We have a few hundred users and we're nearing about 1000 citations. It's an open source project on GitHub.

How do we tell Depsy about it?

Re: How do you get listed?

[friedmud]

Oh - I see now. It's only for Python and R. We're in C++ so no go. Bummer.

Re: How do you get listed?

[Anonymous Coward]

And more importantly doesn't cover FORTRAN.

Spice 2g6

[emil]

The Spice electrical circuit simulation software was developed in FORTRAN on several platforms (including VAX VMS) in the 1970s. I managed to compile it for Linux and Windows years ago, and I host the source and binaries on a laptop in my basement.

This specific version is in many circuits textbooks - newer versions are not compatible with the syntax of this release. I see a fair amount of traffic for it. I should probably spend some time on a nicer HTML5 download page.

Not covered by grants?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are in academia and feel sorry for yourself, you are doing something wrong.

The computational scientists I know, massage ancient code written in Fortran 30 years ago, passed down to them as holy scrolls, tweak the code every once in a while and compare results to new experiments, and then talk about the results ad infinitum while traveling the four corners of the globe. And if they'll ever rewrite the code to take advantage of some of the more modern concepts like C and/or CUDA, they'll make sure to get release time for at least 1 year because of the work involved. All made possible with financial support from NSF, DOE and DOD, and ability to convince management that what they are doing is significantly important, even if only 10 people understand what the hell you are doing.